


Useful or Compelling

by iteration



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Dom/sub Undertones, F/M, dom/sub backstory, emotionally articulate John
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-16
Updated: 2015-08-16
Packaged: 2018-04-15 01:40:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,705
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4588173
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iteration/pseuds/iteration
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A postscript to <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/1118566">An Unstoppable Force</a>. On a Thursday, they run into Lana. On Friday, they fight. In between, Harriet disappears.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Useful or Compelling

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dodificus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dodificus/gifts).
  * Inspired by [An Unstoppable Force](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1118566) by [giandujakiss](https://archiveofourown.org/users/giandujakiss/pseuds/giandujakiss), [iteration](https://archiveofourown.org/users/iteration/pseuds/iteration). 



> Dear reader,
> 
> This fic is basically about building meaningful dialogue and sustainable trust. Unbetaed.
> 
> Dear Dodie,
> 
> I told you I wouldn’t write this, and then I started writing it anyway, and then I told you I wasn’t going to write it anymore, and now here I am posting it. I hope you’re fucking happy. No but, ok, before you laugh me off the internet and never take me seriously again, I just want to say that your enthusiasm has meant a lot to me. So I’m glad your interests and my chronic inability to accept defeat have, today, converged towards the same goal.

When they fight, it’s because of Lana.

They see her on a Thursday. John and Harriet are sitting opposite each other in a coffee shop. Harriet doesn’t see Lana at first; she only notices John looking at something suddenly, and smiling. Harriet doesn’t react, doesn’t look back, she just finds a reflective surface to see what John is smiling at. And it’s Lana.

It’s been just under a year since they’ve seen her. She looks the same. All floppy blonde hair and nervous energy. She leers at John, but she doesn’t come up to talk to them.

The last time Harriet saw Lana, it was on surveillance feed. After the James Stern case, John and Harriet removed all of their things from the subway station, stayed in a hotel for a while to recover. John moved in with Harriet and Bear after that, and they’ve lived in a nondescript condo ever since. And they’ve assembled a new library now. John meticulously labelled the spine of each volume himself. They’ve been working their way through coffee shops in New York City; they’ve never run into any of the numbers before. But here is Lana, in the flesh.

Maybe this incident was overdue; maybe Harriet should have seen it coming.

Harriet has been preparing for large-scale events, life and death threats, since the day Nathan died. A little over a year ago, she started preparing for something different, when she became concerned about having put herself in a vulnerable position. John and she had been growing closer and closer for a long time, and Harriet thought that having feelings for John might lead to her making excessively cautious decisions, or to being unable to think in panic situation. So she put together a list of coping mechanisms and offsetting protocols.

But she’s found that the real hazards of intimacy are the everyday, insignificant details of emotional vulnerability, which cannot be prepared for. Details such as the fact that sometimes, John moves his fingers a certain way, and Harriet feels like she’s losing control. Such as the fact that she only needs to hear him exhale over the comm to become utterly distracted. Such as the fact that she occasionally catches him looking at her, across the table in the library, in the middle of a number, and she orders him to take his clothes off before she even knows what she’s doing.

All those details chip away at Harriet, little by little. She’s not prepared. In a way, she was never prepared. She didn’t know this was going to happen. Harriet used to think that finally having a sexual relationship with John would take the edge off of her desire for him. She’s never been more wrong in her life.

So on Thursday, Harriet doesn’t speak to Lana. She just sees John looking at something behind Harriet and smiling. His smile is almost surreptitious - his eyes crinkling a bit, nothing more. Lana responds by raising an eyebrow. Lana has picked up her coffee, nodded towards them, and run out the door. That’s all. Harriet doesn’t even feel anything about it at first.

But after Lana's left, slowly, gradually, Harriet feels distraught in a way she can neither describe nor explain. In her mind, there is a confusing blend of, firstly, a memory of the morning she walked in on them, of the morbid curiosity she felt then, secondly, a desire to know why he would smile so warmly at Lana now, and thirdly, the wish to _never feel whatever it was she was feeling ever again_. Harriet’s stomach turns.

Harriet looks at John. He’s gone back to his cappuccino and this month’s cover story in Guns & Ammo, and Harriet can’t even begin to think… of anything. Of what to say to him right now, of whether to comment on Lana, whether to tell John that she has conflicting feelings about Lana, and if so, whether to have that conversation here, or to have it somewhere else. She can’t think. She can’t see how that conversation would go. If they even had that conversation, what would be the point? It wouldn’t change the fact that John cared for Lana at least enough to sleep in Lana’s bed - twice - and that jealousy is a deeply useless emotion. That Harriet’s possessiveness is a deeply useless emotion.

The moment stretches. John turns a page, sips some of his coffee. Harriet can’t imagine sitting here and pretending there’s nothing wrong, but she also can’t imagine telling John that she’s distraught over a smile. She takes her glasses off, sets them down on the table. She rubs the bridge of her nose. She looks down at her coffee cup, and realizes that part of her wants to take it and smash it.

“Excuse me, John” she says softly, and takes the back exit.

It’ll probably take four minutes for John to notice that she hasn’t just gotten up to use the washroom, which is enough time, but Harriet doesn’t consciously think about that. She used to disappear from right under John’s nose so often that doing it now just happens reflexively. She walks at a normal pace, goes past the washroom doors, and exits through to the alley.

She doesn’t go far. There is an ATM down the street, where she makes the maximum withdrawal with both the cards she has on her. Then she throws all her devices into a trash can. She left her glasses on the café table so everything is a bit of a haze, but she’s able to walk another one hundred yards to a side-entrance into the Crosby Street Hotel. She hands the front desk clerk cash, and asks to be put down as unlisted. That won’t stop The Machine from finding her, but Harriet is fairly certain The Machine will only seek her out if there is an emergency.

She doesn’t eat, doesn’t sleep, instead asks the front desk to bring her copies of Walden and of the complete works of Emily Dickinson. She looks at the books, when they bring them (beautiful editions, Bear would pounce on them) and thinks that, in terms of reactions to stressful incidents, reading 19th-century American literature is much weirder than that time she started a career as a vigilante. She takes a bath.

Is it spending so much time with John, that is making her behave this way? John was always the one to hit bottom by seeking oblivion. Harriet can’t remember ever having run away like this. It’s unseemly.

Harriet was brought up by people who believed that a person doesn’t deserve attention or support unless it was for logical reasons. They raised her so that she would seek to survive by making herself useful. And it worked. Harriet is alive.

It’s just that she doesn’t want John to be with her because she’s useful.

Every time John looks at her, it seems just a little bit more possible that he loves her. That he really does care about her, not just about what she can do. Except, Harriet now realizes, that’s _worse_. Every day that goes by, in which he looks at her that way, makes everything a little bit worse. Because what can she possibly do to make sure it continues? Every day she loves him a little bit more and she cannot alleviate her insecurities regarding John with the hard work of making herself useful. She can’t alleviate them with anything.

*

On Friday, they fight.

Harriet has been in the room for twenty-four hours when she decides to leave. She dresses in clothes the hotel staff bring her and walks to the library; Bear jumps into her arms. John is there, he looks terrible. Unshaven, with dark circles under his eyes. His shirt is unbuttoned. She doesn’t know what she’s going to tell him. 

“Harriet!” He cries, rushing towards her.

“John.”

A year ago John had sexual encounters with Lana twice, John and Harriet never talked about it, then yesterday Harriet and John saw Lana in a café. They didn't speak to her, but John smiled at Lana. Harriet panicked and ran away, disappeared herself for twenty-four hours. Those are the facts, Harriet thinks. She made sure John couldn’t find her for twenty-four hours, but now, here he is.

He touches her face, gently, and kisses her. He smells a bit like he does when they’re working - just the tiniest bit musky - which is a smell Harriet associates with his physical strength, with his diligence. With him, and how much he loves her, and how much she loves him. “Harriet,” he repeats. “What happened?”

“I needed to get away.”

John freezes. His arms, around Harriet’s shoulders, become dead weights. “What?”

“I needed to get away,” Harriet repeats, extracting herself from his arms.

John stares at her. His face is terrible. “You _what_?”

“I needed to think, I -“

“You mean - you didn’t throw out your phone because of a security risk? You threw it out because -”

“John.”

“Are you out of your mind?“ He is angry. Very angry.

“ _John_ ,” she says again, with the tone he normally defers to.

He stops speaking and straightens up. But then, like he's shaking himself out of something - "I LOOKED for you, Harriet. I haven't stopped looking... _twenty-four hours_! You - HOW COULD YOU?"

Harriet takes a step back. She clears her throat. “John.”

“Harriet!”

“Must you -“ She feels overwrought. “Must you be so _controlling_ , John?” She can’t think. She can’t quite pick out what she wants from what John is trying to make her say, or do. “There was no need to panic. If there had been a number, or another emergency, The Machine would have alerted me.”

“The Machine would have - you would have come back _for a number_?”

Harriet is affronted. “Of course!”

John gapes.

“What on earth is the matter with that?” Harriet says, growing angry.

“You would have come back for a number but -“ John raises his voice “You’re insulted that I would want you to _let me know where you are_?

“Mr Reese, I’ve given you _everything_. You would want to be informed of my whereabouts at every moment, as well?” Harriet takes a step towards John. “Are your muscles and your suits and your guns not enough? You want to be even more of an alpha male? You have to control me?”

John explodes. “I’M NOT TRYING TO CONTROL YOU.”

“BUT YOU ARE.”

John is beside himself. “You want to be able to leave, just leave? You want to do that, and you want me to feel indifferent about that?”

And he advances on Harriet - he punctuates his words with a step forward. He is looming over her, increasingly threatening. Sometimes it’s like he forgets he’s twice her size, like he doesn’t understand that he’s overstepping.

So Harriet pushes him away. But the force of it surprises both of them. After a second of surprise, John starts forward again, starts to speak again. So Harriet slaps him. Her slaps are hard, they’re - they’re confident and calculated and painful. She always makes them even more powerful by never showing that they hurt her hand.

He stumbles back, flushed, and starts to speak, but Harriet, before she even knows what she’s doing, reaches up, grabs a handful of hair, and slaps John again.

*

The first time John asked Harriet to hit him, they’d been in the hotel room, only days after first saying _I love you_ , telling each other so many truths, and it had felt natural. They were in another world, a world in which they told each other everything and nothing was inappropriate. A cocoon all of their own. Harriet had been sitting on the bed and John had been on the floor, naked, fishing for Harriet’s glasses which had fallen under the bed. He’d looked up at her, she’d looked down at him, and she’d run her hand through his hair. Something has seemed to come over him, and that night he’d climbed onto the bed and whispered, “Harriet, sometimes I fantasize about you hitting me.”

She’d remembered the statement the next day, when John had looked down at her, flushed and overwhelmed, as he slipped one finger, then a second one, into her. His eyes were huge, and dark, and every sound Harriet made seemed to be overwhelming him. Devastating him. _Shattering_ him. It was… it was… When he’d eventually climbed on top of her and positioned himself, aligned his cock and started to push in, she hadn’t thought it through, she’d just done it: she’d reached up and gripped his hair.

The next day, she blindfolded him. She didn’t touch him, she only asked him to tell her about the times when he’d masturbated thinking about her. He sat there, docile and enormously, obscenely erect, and told her about the sleepless nights, nights when images of Harriet - Finch, as he said he thought of her then - had floated to the surface of his mind. He told about the long, lonely stakeouts, when Finch’s commands, given softly into his ear, were all he had.

Harriet had listened, overwhelmed, and then had ordered him to tell her about the most arousing thing he could think of.

“Your voice,” he answered, without even needing to think.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Your voice is the hottest thing I can think of.”

Harriet’s heart had started pounding. “…Anything else?”

John had opened his mouth and closed it. There had obviously been _something_.

Harriet had waited for his response, and waited, until she’d realized that it was probably appropriate to be forceful. She’d given him a quick, sharp blow across the face. “Say it. Say the words.”

“Marks,” he’d yelped.

What? “What?”

“If you marked me. As yours.”

Harriet had ripped off the blindfold before she’d even known what she was doing. John’s cheeks had been red, his eyes blue, and when he’d looked up at her, it had been raw, as though nothing stood between himself and the world.

“Oh, John.”

“I just want to be yours.”

 

*

 

John has fallen to his knees. Harriet has slapped him, gripped his hair, and slapped him again.

“Is this what you want?” She asks in a whisper. She sounds distorted. John can feel her shaking.

John hasn’t slept, hasn’t eaten, has been in a panic for hours, he hardly knows his own name, let alone what he wants. His head is fuzzy. He thinks - he thinks of the second time he met Harriet - when he only knew her as Finch - when she’d had people handcuff him to a bed in a hotel room. He’d broken out and found her, pushed her up against a wall and threatened her, and the whole time she’d been unafraid. He thinks, that was years ago, but he can still see it. Still see her face, inexperienced, clumsy, but determined. When Harriet first told John she loved him, he remembers, she had the same face.

“ _Is this what you want?_ ” She asks again.

John nods.

“Say it.”

*

They'd been all over each other, after Harriet told him how she felt, completely wild about it. After she told him her real name and where she lived and anything and everything about herself she could think of, and they lost track of everything, everything. When they’d gone to a hotel and hadn’t left the room for a week.

They’d walked into that hotel room and they’d forgotten that the rest of the world existed, feverish with the discovery that they both wanted the same thing: to be together. John’s heart had barely been able to cope with it all - just seeing the one bed in the room, and suddenly realizing that he would be sleeping there with Harriet, together with her, that he would - his heart had started beating madly, he’d picked Harriet up and set her down on the bed, held her close, and told her that it had been so long, so long. She’d run her hands down John’s back, and inside his clothes, and something about it had felt like - it had felt like Harriet had been thinking about this, if anything, for even longer.

Every moment had seemed almost unspeakably precious. John had said “I love you, I love you, I'm so in love with you" over and over, in that hotel room. Harriet had made small sounds, her eyes had fluttered shut and her mouth had fallen open as he’d pushed into her. He’d seen her hair sticking to the sweat on her forehead, her short, quick breaths, the way she arched against him. And he’d wanted her, wanted her.

And on the third day - or it might have been the fourth or fifth day, for all John could remember - he’d come out of the bathroom and there had been something about the way Harriet looked at him, and a whole different set of fantasies had come flooding back to his mind.

It had been so easy. That night, bundled together under the covers, whispering to each other, like in a cocoon of some kind of unbreakable, inalienable trust, John had said,

"Sometimes I fantasize about you hitting me."

And Harriet had reached out and stroked his brow . "Oh, John."

They hadn’t said anything more that night. But the next day, when Harriet had run her hands over John while he was pushing into her, she’d ended it by gripping a handful of his hair, and he… he…

“Unnngh,” he’d gasped. He’d come hard enough to feel it all the way down to his toes.

Harriet had started giving him orders after that - to sit and tie his own hands down, to blindfold himself and put his head in her lap, to kneel for her - and every time she’d seemed dumbfounded, overwhelmed. Like she’d wanted to do it, like maybe she’s always wanted to do it, but had never thought John would want it too and like she’d been scared, no, terrified, that she might do it wrong.

*

She slaps him again. “ _Is this what you want?_ ”

“I…” he says.

“Say it, John.”

They’ve lost all their bearings. Part of John is screaming at the thought of Harriet having run away, and he doesn’t know how to shut it off. He wants to crawl into the space between them and never leave; he wants to burrow his head into Harriet’s shoulder.

John finally snaps out of it. “ _No._ ” He opens his eyes, he looks up at Harriet. “No. No, no, no, this isn’t what I want.”

Harriet scrutinizes him. Her eyes are blue. When she speaks, it is with barely-restrained frustration. “What _do_ you want?”

John Reese was brought up to think he didn’t deserve attention or support unless he was compelling. Survival, to him, had always meant performing properly to his audience, making them love him enough to let him live. He wants - desperately, hopelessly - for Harriet to find him more special than she finds anyone else, more irreplaceable than anyone else, superior to everyone else. But he can’t do that if she occasionally disappears without reason or explanation, even if it’s only for a day. And he can see that he is losing Harriet’s attention, but he can’t help uttering a last cry of despair before giving up on her.

Remaining on his knees, he says, “I want to know what I did wrong.”

Harriet blinks. “What?”

“What did I do wrong?”

“You,” she seems frozen in place. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

Still kneeling, John whispers, “then why did you leave?”

She starts, and turns her back to John. She takes a step towards the desk and sits down.

“John, I -“ She runs her hand through her hair, dislodging the comb. Her hair tumbles down over her shoulders. “I didn’t want to -“

She takes her head in her hands. There is a pause. Dust motes float by and street noises float in through the window. John holds his breath.

And then, Harriet lets out a sudden, incongruous, burst of words. “I don't know the right way to _be_ with you, John,” she babbles. “And yesterday I couldn’t think, I just couldn’t think. I don’t - sometimes I don’t know whether I should tell you the things that go through my head, or whether I should keep them to myself, and I don't know if the way you look at me means that you want me to move towards you or that you want me to sit right where I am and I -"

John gets to his feet, sits in the other chair “But why -“

“You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Harriet.” John closes his eyes. Opens them. “You needed to get away. _From me_.”

She jumps in her chair, slightly, making a jerking movement.

John can hardly breathe; his next word comes out as a gasp. “ _Why?_ ”

“ _John_.”

“I would've been happy never to touch you, Harriet. I would've been happy just to see you every day. Why would you -”

Harriet blurts out, “we never talked about Lana.”

“ _Lana_?” John says the name loudly enough for a slight echo to sound through the library.

“She was in the café yesterday.”

John is dumbstruck. “And you -“

“You smiled at her.”

John stands up. “Harriet, I’ve never cared, not even once, whether Lana was thinking about me or not. Unlike - for years, I’ve wanted _you_ to be thinking about me all the time.”

Harriet closes her eyes, squeezes them shut. Then, to John’s complete shock, she bursts into tears.

*

Some time later, John has picked Harriet up and sat them both down on one of the chairs. She sits on his lap, her arms wrapped around him. She kisses him.

John kisses back. “I thought something happened to you,” he says. “I couldn't find you."

“John?” Harriet closes her eyes, touches her forehead to his.

“Yes?”

“I’m sorry.”

John nods, slowly. He nuzzles her jawline. “Harriet?”

“Yes?”

“I think - seeing Lana made me smile because she’s the one who brought us together.”

Harriet takes a deep breath, lets it out softly. Then she says, “oh.”

“And Harriet?”

“Yes?”

“I’ve told you what I wanted.” John says. “I want you. I just want you. But what do _you_ want?”

Harriet runs her hand over John’s chest. “Take your clothes off, I’ll show you.”

**Author's Note:**

> This fic came about because the last three chapters of Unstoppable were originally supposed to include a fight between John and Harriet, and so I had a lot of notes and little bits of dialogue sitting around on my hard drive. When Dodificus commented on the shortness of the explicit scene in chapter seven, it all got conflated in my head, and turned into a big tangled ball of fucking and fighting.
> 
> I always pictured Harriet being confused by John’s devotion to her, and part of me always wants to make characters cry. The truth is, this fic was never meant to be more than one thousand or so words of porn, set against a backdrop of eventually-resolved misunderstanding. (Funfact: it was first saved under “filthy outtake” and then saved under “untitled postscript PWP.” Now it’s saved under “I don’t even know.”) Then the first draft ended up a bit like that later addition to the novel Maurice - unexpectedly bleak and depressing! A thousand apologies to my original beta, who flat out told me that if it kept getting darker, she wasn’t going to help me with it anymore. Yikes. Now I think (I think?) it’s not that dark, it’s just about the way that if you’re in a relationship long enough, you start overturning some psychological stones you didn’t even know were there, and finding some surprises underneath. And then weird shit happens, but also the sex gets better. So.


End file.
